Ultimate Poker Gives Info About VIP Program

Tuesday, July 23rd, 2013 by Ryan

In terms of online poker, it’s been scarce to say the least in the United States since Black Friday pretty much derailed the massive online poker sites such as Full Tilt Poker, and PokerStars (at least for United States players). Things completely changed for fans of online poker, and recently if you’ve lived in the United States and have been looking for an online poker site, there are very few options. The first and only regulated online poker site to get up and running is Ultimate Poker (UP) and is currently only regulated in the state of Nevada. With the site getting rolling around the time of the World Series of Poker out in Las Vegas, Nevada, it definitely helped build up the traffic a bit. Now though, they have released some of the details relating to their VIP program, thanks to a UP representative who showed up at the Two Plus Two forums in Scott “Scottyy” Yeates.

The decision about the type of VIP method to use is that they are going with the “Winner Take All” (WTA) method of distribution. This is a method that not many online poker sites out there have decided to use. Because of this fact, it has drawn the attention of many of the players and poker fans out there, even if they aren’t able to play at the site. You are going to find that the standard options are normally the “dealt” method, or the “weighted contributed” method. In the dealt method, any player who gets cards in the hand gets a share of the VIP points that are awarded during the hand, which all depends on the amount of rake taken from the pot. We have seen sites shy away from this in recent months and years though, but the multi-table players out there definitely love this option.

The weighted contributed method is what you are going to find with most sites here. This gives points to the players who actually put money into the pot, and it depends on how much money that they put into the pot as to how many points that they will get. So the player who contributes the most will obviously get the most points, and it will be broken down by player from there. This is a pretty fair way in general to chop up the points, and the players who play just at a table or two when they get into the action tend to like this, especially if they play a good number of hands.

The method that Ultimate Poker uses is going to give the player who wins the pot all of the VIP points that are attached with the hand. Obviously this comes with varying opinions, but it does make sense to many since the winners pot is the one that is going to end up losing the rake that goes to the house. It was pointed out on the forum that obviously a multi-tabler who doesn’t play a large number of hand is going to get a ton back in terms of the VIP points here. It was summed up perfectly in a quote from a rep from the site that said that their plan is to “reward the weak players who go to showdown often, and keep them in the action. Nits need not apply.”

There was information also given about how the structure for the VIP program would work, and it is going to have ten different levels for players. There are two yearly and eight monthly levels that the players are going to be playing for. At the beginning level, players are going to get 10 points for winning a pot that has $1 in rake, and when the player pays $2 in rake for the month he goes up to the second level which is going to give 20 points for the same raked hand.

The program itself is going to get going when they release the new version of Ultimate Poker’s software. The approval of the software should come sometime shortly after the meeting of The Nevada Gaming Control Board that will be held on Thursday, July 25th.